A Shooting in Arizona

Where can you take a child in this country? If to the supermarket, to meet her congresswoman, is no longer on that list, then we are in trouble. Saturday morning, a man began shooting at a Safeway in Tucson, where Representative Gabrielle Giffords was standing under a sign with her name on it. One bullet hit her in the face and went “through and through” her head, as her doctor told reporters. She is in critical condition. There were more bullets: one killed Christina-Taylor Green, who was nine years old and had just been elected president of her school's student council; the neighbor who brought her thought that she might want to meet a grownup politician, her uncle told the Arizona Republic. She liked ballet, and was the only girl on her Little League team. (Her grandfather, Dallas Green, had managed the Phillies, Mets, and Yankees.) Christina-Taylor was born on September 11, 2001. And a bullet killed a sixty-three-year-old federal judge, John M. Roll. Four other people—Gabe Zimmerman, who was thirty and engaged; Dorthy Murray and Dorwin Stoddard, who were both seventy-six; and Phyllis Sheck, who was seventy-nine—were killed, too, and a dozen more were wounded.

Giffords is forty. Three years ago, she married an astronaut, Captain Mark Kelly, who is also a Navy pilot. Kelly flew on the space shuttle three times. Did the world look more alien to him from outer space or from the hospital where, tonight, doctors were trying to save his wife?

The suspect is named Jared Loughner, and he is twenty-two. What exactly was behind the shooting isn’t known yet; Saturday evening, the Arizona police said that they were seeking a second suspect as well, but on Sunday the sheriff said that the man in question was only the cabdriver who brought Loughner there. The gunman may simply be mad. (Madness can be tuned by the times.) According to the Washington Post, Loughner “appears to have left a trail of Internet postings, including some that express convoluted observations about government.” (Some of those observations had to do with silver and gold, and legal tender.) Convoluted might count as a kind word for the political tone in Arizona lately, with an anti-immigrant impulse coupled with tensions over the Obama Administration’s policies. Not that Giffords was always in line with those policies: she was a Blue Dog Democrat, a rarer type after the midterms. The middle, like that Tucson supermarket, has become a dangerous place. She had just barely defeated an opponent backed by the Tea Party, despite, not thanks to, her vote in favor of health-care reform. She had reportedly received threats on that account before—last year, someone threw a brick through her office’s window. “I know Gabby is as tough as they come, and I am hopeful that she’s going to pull through,” President Obama said today. He also sent Robert Mueller, the head of the F.B.I., to Arizona.

But this isn’t just on Arizona; that state is not the only quarter of the country in which a sort of extremism has taken hold—and a sort of contempt, which has not been entirely confined to one side or the other, or to madmen as opposed to ostensibly sane ones. Obama said that the tragedy was broader than Giffords’s or her state’s, and it was—not only because, while she was the target, others were killed, but because our political culture was attacked and (again, with the caveat that the gunman’s precise motives and soundness of mind aren’t known) was also implicated. Congressmen John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and Senator John McCain, all released statements that had a word in common: “horrified.” It’s a proper word—this is horrifying—and undoubtedly a lot of people used it Saturday. But to the extent to which it’s meant to convey surprise, it may not be quite right.

I’ll continue updating this post as we learn more. My colleague George Packer has a strong post up about the tragedy and the language of rage. One positive note: the gunman was apprehended, according to the Times, because he “was tackled by a bystander” at the supermarket. So we’re not all lost, in terms of looking out for each other.

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